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Stephanie Alexander is in the kitchen at her Richmond Hill Cafe & Larder in Melbourne, stirring up oyster soup and fish quenelles for dinner. She's rarely behind the stove these days, but the chef left a day ago and someone else had a car accident. So, as she checks on the afternoon coffee drinkers, she has a bowl and wooden spoon in her hands.

"That's the restaurant life for you - a crisis every minute," she says in her capable, broad-Australian voice. There's been another tiny crisis, too. Planning the quenelles, she says, "I flipped open my own book confidently to check the egg white and the cream and the recipe's not there!"

It's hard to imagine anything missing from the massive second edition of The Cook's Companion. "The complete book of ingredients and recipes for the Australian kitchen", as it has always been subtitled, is more complete than ever. (And there is a recipe for quenelles, in the prawn chapter.)

Alexander has researched her famous book all over again, adding 300 pages (for a total of 1100), 328 recipes and 543 marginal ideas for the quick meals that keep a lot of households going.

The new edition is a gorgeous hunk, wrapped in rainbow stripes, edged with silver and retailing for a cocky $125. Can it seduce fans away from their spattered and sticky copies of the original, now eight years old and part of the family?

In a society hooked on cookbooks, no other has come close to the publishing phenomenon of The Cook's Companion. Sales of the first edition climbed steadily to nearly 300,000 before Penguin stopped printing it earlier this year.

"I think people who've loved it themselves buy it for someone else, a sister or a son who's leaving home," says Alexander. "It's got that authority with everybody and that's the ultimate thing for a writer. It's not a lifestyle book; it doesn't sit on the coffee table. More often than not it's in the kitchen being used, with the binding getting loose. People say, 'Let's see what Stephanie says.' I hear over and over again from people that it's a mantra in their house. It strikes fear in the heart a bit because none of us is perfect."

No one could have forecast the impact when Alexander first told her publisher, Julie Gibbs, she'd like to write an alphabetical guide to ingredients. She was then the chef at Stephanie's Restaurant, the top-rated Melbourne eatery she ran for 21 years, and had written four cookbooks.

Stephanie Alexander. Photo: Simon Schluter

Even though she began her career as a librarian, she had been inspired - by her mother's creative home cooking and her own travels in France - to love fresh food, from garden to market to kitchen and table. The new book would draw together all her knowledge and her concern that young people, in particular, were ignorant of how to use and enjoy Australia's abundant seasonal produce.

The former librarian started at A. "I got through anchovies and apples and realised with horror that if I was going to do this as I wanted I would have to do some research. I think the key to the book's success is that I had to get quite boring or dead material and make it read in a lively way."

Alexander dealt with varieties of apples, when they ripen in different climates and how cool storage affects them, then gave simple ideas on how to use them, as well as a few more precise recipes. When she got to C, she had bulging entries on foods such as carrots, cheese, chocolate and cucumbers.

"At that stage I had written the equivalent of an ordinary book and I thought, 'I have to go and confess'." The response from Penguin's publishing director, Bob Sessions, was "Tell her to cut it". But Gibbs believed the book was too good to rein in. The finished manuscript stood waist-high.

The book had 800 pages of text, clearly organised by Alexander's librarian skills and designer Sandy Cull's visual talent. Alexander was adamant she didn't want conventional pictures of food on plates, so there were just a few still-life photographs by Earl Carter. The cover had little drawings of an apple, beans and a chook, immediately looking like a comfortable old classic.

Penguin boldly printed 15,000 copies, despite booksellers' caution about a cookbook that cost $75 and had no food pictures. They sold out within weeks of publication in October 1996, as did a second printing of 5000, and then there were no more books until February. "I was frothing at the mouth," says Alexander. Gibbs assured her people would buy the book after Christmas, and they did.

"I always thought it would be an important reference book, but I couldn't predict that it would enter people's hearts and minds the way it has," says Gibbs. "It is very much a book about food that people cook at home. The recipes work; they're organised in an easy-to-use way - not a very creative way, but it didn't have to be. You can open the fridge and see you have eggplant or come home with fish and look up what to do with it."

As time went on, Alexander discovered better versions of some dishes in the Companion, had reader feedback, found information was out-of-date or wrong, and was excited by a new generation of products, growers, suppliers and cooks. It became obvious that she should do a complete revision.

Gibbs says, "We also wanted to put back in all the things we'd made Stephanie take out. There had been a strategy not to put in classic recipes that you can get elsewhere like corned beef and Christmas cake, but people were asking for them."

Alexander begins the new book with a polemic essay on organic foods and genetic modification ("a lot of people would like me to be tougher"), hydroponics and the crunchy, non-dribbling stone fruits "that I loathe and detest". She has expanded the section on basics such as measurements because, she says, "I find the biggest mistake in amateur cooks is confusing weight and volume."

Recipes come from friends, other chefs, apprentices and her own hand. Introductions are chattier: for example, the roasted fillet of beef now begins, "This recipe might look very long and scary." Alexander, a teacher by nature, says,

"I constantly want to feel I'm holding the person's hand so they can be confident that they'll produce a beautiful dish at the end. I get very annoyed at cookbook writers who omit that information."

The meat chapters take in new products and recipes range from classic pork pie to Thai-style beef salad. There are, in general, more simple Asian and Middle Eastern dishes. In the expanded chapter on game birds, she describes Cape Barren goose, farmed only on Flinders Island, as "the most exciting indigenous animal I have tasted".

Alexander's only demand for the book's design was the glossy photographs of farmers, fishermen, beekeepers, bakers and their landscapes, again by Carter. Comfortingly, the book's design is mainly unchanged but for a few more reference aids.

The outside is another matter. A Melbourne artist, Matthew Johnson, was commissioned to do the abstract cover painting, with colours that hint at lush fruits and vegetables. Aiming at a new generation of buyers, Gibbs didn't want it to look "like grandma's book". She also had to persuade owners of the first edition that this was a different book. Penguin won't be caught short this time if it takes off. There are 60,000 copies ready for the Christmas market.

Future printings will correct two mistakes already spotted by the precise Alexander, made when she cut down recipes for larger quantities. The passionfruit bavarois should use six leaves of gelatine per litre (not 12) and the cheese-flavoured gougeres take one quantity of choux pastry (not half). "Please tell people," she says.

Alexander has evolved personally in the years between editions. "Accessibility is everything," she says of her food philosophy now. She wearied of her elegant, white-cloth restaurant and her second marriage ended. Profits from her bestseller enabled her to wind up the business at the end of 1996, buy a house in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond and, the next year, open the nearby Richmond Hill Cafe & Larder with one of her two daughters and several other partners.

The big, wooden-floored dining room is in a Victorian shopfront among discount clothing shops. Seven days a week it serves casual breakfasts and lunches and more - but not very - formal dinners, which she designs and supervises. Staff bustle behind the marble counter; shoppers buy oils, condiments, breads and cheeses from the pungent cool room.

The workaholic Alexander runs a project at a disadvantaged primary school, where pupils learn about food by growing, picking, cooking and eating their own fruit and vegetables. Despite an exhausting battle for funding, she believes this is the key to their future as cooks and consumers.

Now for the hard question. Will she urge people to throw away their old Cook's Companion and buy the new? "No," she says. "People are very attached to their books. What I'll say in the gentlest way is, by all means continue to use it, but you will find there are differences in cooking times, I've picked up anomalies and here and there I've dropped a version. The new choux pastry recipe is much better, I've changed the lemon curd recipe, there wasn't a basic sponge and now there are two. I know it's a better book."

The Cook's Companion (Penguin/Lantern, $125) will be published on October 4.